1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to managing alert thresholds.
2. Description of Prior Art
Information services and data processing industries in general have rapidly expanded as a result of the need for computer systems to manage and store large amounts of data. As an example, financial service companies such as banks, mutual fund companies and the like now, more than ever before, require access to many hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data and files stored in high capacity data storage systems. Other types of service companies have similar needs for data storage.
Data storage system developers have responded to the increased need for storage by integrating high capacity data storage systems, data communications devices (e.g., switches), and computer systems (e.g., host computers or servers) into so-called “storage networks” or “Storage Area Networks” (SANs.)
In a typical storage environment comprising multiple servers coupled to one or more storage units (either physical storage units or logical storage units such as volumes), an administrator administering the environment has to perform several tasks to ensure availability and efficient accessibility of data. In particular, an administrator has to ensure that there are no outages due to lack of availability of storage space for any server, especially servers running critical applications. The administrator thus has to monitor space utilization for the various servers. Presently, this is done either manually or using software tools that generate alarms/alerts when certain capacity thresholds associated with the storage units are reached or exceeded.